Unconstrained Higher Spins of Mixed Symmetry. I. Bose Fields

Understand

This is the first of two papers devoted to the local "metric-like" unconstrained Lagrangians and field equations for higher-spin gauge fields of mixed symmetry in flat space.

• Here we complete the previous constrained formulation of Labastida for Bose fields.
• We thus recover his Lagrangians via the Bianchi identities, before extending them to their "minimal" unconstrained form with higher derivatives of the compensator fields and to yet another, non-minimal, form with only two-derivative terms.
• We also identify classes of these systems that are invariant under Weyl-like symmetries.